Ushuaia, del Fin del Mundo

I knew as the airplane broke through the dense, white cloud layer and the "ooooo's" and "aaahhhh's" and "wow!s" from the passengers sitting near the windows spread through the cabin that I was about to land in a very special place.

Since I had spent the majority of the 20 hours in flight crammed uncomfortably into the dreaded "middle seat" on the final leg of my exhausting journey from Buenos Aires to Tierra del Fuego I finally was given an aisle seat, a small but significant relief from my bondage.  I was reveling in the fact that I could actually move at least ONE elbow out into free space and not have a seatmate poking me back with his.  (Travel's small pleasures that one savors along the way!) 

It mattered not, or at least I didn't think so, that I couldn't see out of the window as I requested "either Seat A or Seat C, but not Seat B!" at the airport since most most of my air travel years I have requested a window seat.  As time has moved forward and my aging bladder has become a bit more fussy and unpredictable, I have decided out of sheer necessity to forgo the thrill of sitting by the window for the convenience of easy access to the lavatory.  On this day, however, I wanted nothing more than to plaster my face to the surface of that glass, eyes wide open, to see what all those others were experiencing and furthermore what all the hubbub was about.

From the small slices of view below I was able to catch, what everyone was suddenly excited about was the sudden appearance of the 8,000 feet snow-capped, jagged and magnificent Andes Mountains that had appeared as the plane broke through the blanket of clouds.  They dropped dramatically right down to the edge of the serene, expansive bay, leaving only sparse amounts of land available for any sort of settlement. But nestled there next to the foot of these incredible mountains on a tiny shelf of flat land defiantly claiming its own space sat the tiny, simple village of Ushuaia, the world's most southern city.

The capital city of Tierra del Fuego Province, Argentina, Ushuaia is a former penal colony and was later settled by gold speculators in the late 1880s. It's very small, rugged and quaint, and there are only a handful of buildings that are over two stories tall.  It reminds me very much of the tiny villages I saw in Alaska when my family travelled there in the 1960s where the impressive, snow-covered mountains dominated the skyline and seemed to hog much of the inhabitable shoreline to themselves leaving only scant amounts of space for human development.  My mother, Thelma, who spent part of your childhood up in Juneau, would probably love it here and feel right at home.

With only less than a full day here in Ushuaia, time is limited for sightseeing before I climb aboard the M/S Expedition, the cruise ship waiting for me (and visible from my hotel room, almost as if it's teasing me and saying, "Here I am, waiting to take you away!") and head off across the Beagle Channel and south to my final destination. 

So, indeed I have arrived at Tierra del Fuego in all its breathtaking glory! It feels wonderful and a bit surreal to have made it to the End of the Earth to this unique landing strip of a town, Ushuaia, my springboard to Antarctica.